Month: November 2013

Zoumbas (Appellant) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent) On appeal from the Inner House of the Court of Session, [2012] CSIH 87 [2013] UKSC 74 – read judgment

The Supreme Court has clarified the principles to be applied when considering the welfare of children in deportation cases. The following summary is based on the Supreme Court’s Press Summary.

The appellant (Mr Z) and his wife (Mrs Z) are nationals of the Republic of Congo currently living in Glasgow with their three children, now aged 9, 5 and 2. Mr Z entered the UK illegally in May 2001 using a French passport that did not belong to him. He married Mrs Z in November 2003 after she had entered the previous year using a forged French passport and both their asylum claims had been refused. Their appeals were unsuccessful . In October 2005 Mrs Z and the couple’s daughter (A) were detained and removed to Congo. For the following ten months, Mr Z was treated as an absconder having failed to report to the authorities.

In what appears to be the first case where the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) has had to consider the investigation of crimes committed extraterritorially, the Court has made it clear that the perpetrators of systematic torture – as was alleged in this case – can be held accountable in South Africa regardless of where the offending acts took place.

It had been alleged that Zimbabwean officials had on a widespread scale tortured opponents of the ruling party. The Gauteng high court had ordered the SAPS to initiate an investigation under the Implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Act 27 of 2002 (the ICC Act) into the alleged offences (see my previous post on that ruling). Continue reading →

We all know the story about how Andrew Mitchell MP may, or may not, have tried to barge past policeman in Downing Street with the memorable phrase “you’re f…ing plebs”. Like a lot of good stories, it may not be true, and like a lot of good stories it was picked up by The Sun. So Mr Mitchell sues The Sun in libel on the basis that it is untrue.

But this decision of the Court of Appeal is all about the reforms initiated by the man to my left, Sir Rupert Jackson, also a judge in the CA, who has shaken up the whole system of legal costs in civil litigation. And one of the major steps he has taken is to compel litigants to say what they intend to spend on a case early on – the costs budget – so that the judges can make some assessment of whether the thing is to be run sensibly or extravagantly.

Cue the present argument, where our MP’s lawyers do not file their costs budget on time, which is 7 days before the relevant hearing. So the parties go before the court, and The Sun says – we did our bit on time but we only got their budget yesterday, and we are not ready. To cut a long story short, The Sun now stand to recover a budgeted figure of £589,555 if they win, but our hapless MP (or his lawyers) will only recover his court fees if he wins.

A new challenge was filed yesterday to the badger cull extension presently under way in the South West of England.

An eight week extension to the Gloucestershire pilot cull was granted by Natural England after the initial trial period failed to reach its 70% target, and began on 23 October. Brian May’s Save Me organisation, represented by John Cooper QC, has put in an “exceptionally urgent” application for judicial review of the extension of the licence for the cull in Gloucestershire. The Secretary of State For Environment Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, and Natural England are named as defendants. Other interested parties are the National Farmers Union and the Badger Trust.

According to the Save Me organisation, the call for an urgent review is based on the reasoning that with the Gloucestershire extension already operative, and unless this is urgently addressed the period of the extension might elapse before a formal review can be applied. Continue reading →

This appeal concerned the law on discrimination. Mr and Mrs Bull, the appellants, own a private hotel in Cornwall. They are committed Christians, who sincerely believe that sexual intercourse outside traditional marriage is sinful. They operate a policy at their hotel, stated on their on-line booking form, that double bedrooms are available only to “heterosexual married couples”.

The following summary is taken from the Supreme Court’s press report. See Marina Wheeler’s post on the ruling by the Court of Appeal in this case. A full analysis of the case will follow shortly.

References in square brackets are to paragraphs in the judgment.

The respondents, Mr Hall and Mr Preddy, are a homosexual couple in a civil partnership. On 4 September 2008 Mr Preddy booked, by telephone, a double room at the appellants’ hotel for the nights of 5 and 6 September. By an oversight, Mrs Bull did not inform him of the appellants’ policy. On arrival at the hotel, Mr Hall and Mr Preddy were informed that they could not stay in a double bedroom. They found this “very hurtful”, protested, and left to find alternative accommodation. Continue reading →

An extraordinary story, with a twist, and an interesting decision by the Strasbourg Court that lack of respect for the honour and dignity of a dead relative may give rise to a breach of Article 8 and its right to family life.

In 1942 various professional footballers who had previously played for FC Dynamo Kyiv but who were now working in a bakery, ran out in the strip of FC Start. Their opponents (Flakelf) were pilots from the German Luftwaffe, air defence soldiers and airport technicians.

A judge in the Court of Protection has ruled that a man who had “exploited and took advantage” of a young woman for the purpose of seeking to bolster his immigration appeal had engaged in an invalid marriage ceremony. The man, said Keehan J, had

“deliberately targeted” the respondent because of her learning difficulties and her vulnerability.

The courts would not tolerate such “gross exploitation.”

This was an application by a local authority in the Court of Protection in respect of the capacity of the respondent, SY, to litigate and to make decisions in relation to her life. Continue reading →

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This blog is maintained for information purposes only. It is not intended to be a source of legal advice and must not be relied upon as such. Blog posts reflect the views and opinions of their individual authors, not of chambers as a whole.